Local queries of MPC observations. When disk-space is no issue and remote-queries fail too often. Else, use astroquery.mpc

Clone the git repository or download the zip. Then run

$ [sudo] pip install --editable .

to install it. An executable mpc is added to your path and can be called system-wide.

Running mpc retrieve will download the latest observations to the package directory. Unzipped, this is more than 20GB of text files. You can specify --numbered-only or --unnumbered-only to only update the respective observations.

Once the download has finished, run mpc obs to grep through the observation files. Target asteroids can be specified by --number or --designation. By default, the observations are echoed to the terminal. Using --csv will save them to file in the current working directory. Using the --raw flag, the original MPC format is returned, else, the observations are converted to a more readable format.